a blog about video games and learning

Service announcement: join my book club (or any book club for that matter)

I recently set a challenge for myself: start reading again. Don’t get me wrong, I read things all the time. I read street signs, news articles, forum threads, work reports, even receipts. But not novels for some reason. I used to read fiction all the time as a youngster. I consumed so many books I was often told to go play outside “for once.”

But as I went through university and was forced to read “their” books and as the internet became more of a thing for me, my reading habits died down. A lot. As someone who writes a lot, this is a bad thing. If you want to be a professional basketball player, you don’t just practice your layups all day; you have to watch pro games and analyze what you’re seeing. So, with that analogy in mind, I started a bookclub.

The concept here is that, as a group, reading suddenly becomes much easier. Reading assignments in school, while not always centered around GOOD books, were at least a communal effort to understand what we were reading. That sense of community made reading the oft-boring books much more bearable.

The way my book club works is simple: people give me suggestions for books they want to read, I organize them into a reading list, then we work through each book as a group every week. Pretty simple. Honestly, I’ve read more novels these past few weeks than I have over the last year or two. That feeling of wanting to keep up with everyone and be able to talk about it later has really driven me to keep reading, which was the point all along!

If you’re interested in joining my group, you can find it here: The Book Club

Even if you don’t join my group, there are tons out there. Find yourself a group that matches your interests and go nuts. It’s way easier than you’d think and the promise of having comrades simultaneously reading whatever amazing (or incredibly shitty) book you’re reading will pay off soon enough.